Feedback on cue points and OSC
Hi, it´s great to see so many great features being added to Millumin.
I am particularly interested in the timeline and OSC control, and thought I would come with a few comments and feature suggestions.
I think the cue points have great potential, but in the current implementation I find them slightly unintuitive, as they are more stop-points than cue-points. In other applications when you set a cue point you would set it at the beginning of a new section, here you have to set it at the frame before (the end of the previous section). One practical issue when setting the cue points is if you want a cue point at the joint of two clips in a layer. If you use the snap-on feature the cue point would easily settle at the first frame of the second clip, as shown here:
However this would not produce the expected result when used as a stop-cue. The playback head would stop at the first frame of the second clip, instead of the last frame of the first clip. To get it to work you would need to zoom into frame level on the timeline and move the cuepoint one frame to the left:
If the cue points worked as I suggest it could be very easy to jump to different sections of the timeline, especially if this was implemented with OSC. It would also be great to have Millumin send out an OSC message when it reaches a cue point, so this could be used to trigger other events.
Maybe even there could be more general markers that can be just osc triggers (maybe a toggle to indicate if they should also be cue points?).
So if a marker is used as a cue point (play until you reach the next cue point) maybe Millumin internally could mark the frame before a cue-point as a stop-point?
A small OSC thing:
I have done some basic testing of the osc capabilities, and came across something I found a bit odd: When I was monitoring the time being sent from Millumin (/millumin/layer/media/time/) I would get slightly different values monitoring the same layer in two different ways: as selected layer (0) and specified by layer nr. I would expect the times reported to be exactly the same?
I also sent some bug reports/comments by email. Hope you find it useful, and I am looking forward to the continuation of Millumin.
I am particularly interested in the timeline and OSC control, and thought I would come with a few comments and feature suggestions.
I think the cue points have great potential, but in the current implementation I find them slightly unintuitive, as they are more stop-points than cue-points. In other applications when you set a cue point you would set it at the beginning of a new section, here you have to set it at the frame before (the end of the previous section). One practical issue when setting the cue points is if you want a cue point at the joint of two clips in a layer. If you use the snap-on feature the cue point would easily settle at the first frame of the second clip, as shown here:
However this would not produce the expected result when used as a stop-cue. The playback head would stop at the first frame of the second clip, instead of the last frame of the first clip. To get it to work you would need to zoom into frame level on the timeline and move the cuepoint one frame to the left:
If the cue points worked as I suggest it could be very easy to jump to different sections of the timeline, especially if this was implemented with OSC. It would also be great to have Millumin send out an OSC message when it reaches a cue point, so this could be used to trigger other events.
Maybe even there could be more general markers that can be just osc triggers (maybe a toggle to indicate if they should also be cue points?).
So if a marker is used as a cue point (play until you reach the next cue point) maybe Millumin internally could mark the frame before a cue-point as a stop-point?
A small OSC thing:
I have done some basic testing of the osc capabilities, and came across something I found a bit odd: When I was monitoring the time being sent from Millumin (/millumin/layer/media/time/) I would get slightly different values monitoring the same layer in two different ways: as selected layer (0) and specified by layer nr. I would expect the times reported to be exactly the same?
I also sent some bug reports/comments by email. Hope you find it useful, and I am looking forward to the continuation of Millumin.
Comments
Sorry for this big delay, but I was waiting for some features to be released.
Last year, following your suggestion, I make it possible to snap at any keyframe or timeline item : you just need to maintain [SHIFT], just as in After Effects.
Also, cuepoints send an OSC message to tell they have been reached. And now it's very easy to handle this via MilluPlug : you don't even need to know about OSC !
I'd just like to add that composition are rather made for creation, and
the dashboard should be used for live (you can use the cuepoints in the
dashboard).
Flexible time management is a big topic : it shouldn't as linear as
composition are now. I'm thinking a lot about it to find a nice solution
for composition, and have stop-cues, jump-cues, loop-cues, ...
About your OSC problem with /millumin/layer/media/time/, I couldn't reproduce it. If it is still the case, please send me an email, with if possible, a video showing this behavior.
Best. Philippe
PS : I saw your progresses on VPT 7, congratulations !